October 31, 2014

Communist Party of Venezuela struggle vs Opportunism

I In its 80 years of existence, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), like many other communist and workers' parties of the world has faced in more than one occasion both right opportunism and left opportunism. The celebration of our First National Conference in August 1937 was already marked by this struggle, which was expressed on that occasion as the conflict between those who defended the need to give the party its own organizational structure and show themselves to the country as a proletarian organization with an independent programme and action, and those who unsuccessfully proposed, from an right-wing opportunist position, to abort the formation of the Party and dissolve it within the liberal-bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political organizations of the time [1980-a ].

From 1941 to 1945, the Venezuelan Communists suffered a new right-wing opportunist deviation which promoted class collaboration and was strengthened in 1943 with the adoption of the liquidationist doctrine internationally known as 'Browderism'. The influence and spread of this doctrine, that had very serious repercussions in several Latin American countries, was favoured in Venezuela due to the closeness to the government of the time (presidency of Isaías Medina) of diverse progressive and revolutionary sectors since 1942 and the division that existed then in the Communist ranks. This picture was essentially solved by the celebration, in December 1946, of our First Congress, called "Unity", which managed to unite most of the communist groups of the time under the name that our Party has always had, and issued a stern censorship to 'Browderism' and class collaboration [1946].

Opportunism, in its most general sense, can be defined as any alteration of the policy, program or theoretical conceptions of revolutionary parties or labour movements, arising from the influence of events and circumstances at the time, that objectively moves them away from the historical interests and own strategic needs of the working class and, instead, leads them to coincide with the interests and needs of non-proletarian strata and classes of society (particularly of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie). As has already been pointed out by several authors, the different varieties of opportunism differ from each other mainly because of the layers and sectors of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie where it comes from and behind which they aim to drag the workers' and revolutionary movement [1924].

In Venezuela, this rule has been met with remarkable regularity, and since over the years various petty bourgeois, intellectual and professional sectors have had very strong presence in the composition of the ranks of our party, not surprisingly we have experienced repeated outbreaks of opportunism, both right-wing and left-wing. The most severe and damaging episode of left opportunism occurred throughout the 1960s and resulted in the split of our Party that gave rise to the so-called Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), to which we devote a few paragraphs.

But right-wing opportunism has also appeared in our organization and in its periphery, not only, as we saw, at the Conference of 1937 and in the 1940s, but also on other occasions, most recently in 2006-2007 when we confronted and defeated a new liquidationist outbreak that claimed once again, as on that historic Conference, to dissolve the party and add it to another multi-cass organization with a petty bourgeois orientation, but managed only to cause us a relatively minor detachment. We will also devote special attention to this recent episode, not so much for its quantitative importance, but for its importance in the interpretation and analysis of the current national political situation.

We will also discuss, albeit briefly, some other manifestations of opportunism that we have fought and continue to fight against in other supposedly "revolutionary" or "progressive" organizations, and whose denunciation and unmasking are necessary to avoid ideological confusion and political disorientation of the working class and the people in general. `

II In our country the 1960s began in an atmosphere full of opportunities and threats. After the overthrow of the military dictatorship in January 1958 as a result of the successful and courageousd PCV alliance policy that led to a genuine popular uprising, the political situation was rapidly decomposing. The hopes aroused by the popular triumph over dictatorship were almost immediately betrayed by the so-called "landmark pact" by which the right-wing parties (the Social-Democrat AD and COPEI Christian Democrat, with URD's complicity as junior partner) agreed the exclusion of Communists and other progressive and popular forces of the new government. This pact later resulted in the formation of a two-party system for the preservation of the interests of imperialism and the local bourgeoisie associated to it.

Between 1962 and 1967, the PCV developed the tactics of armed struggle in response to unpatriotic and unpopular governments that emerged from that covenant. Without discussing the mistakes made by the Party in the series of political decisions that led to the armed struggle, nor committed during those war years both in the military direction of the actions and especially their political leadership, in 1965 it was quite clear that there were no conditions in the country for the successful development of such tactics, and our Central Committee was well aware of that. At that time the possibilities for a military withdrawal and and organized reintegration of our Party in the national political life were debated [1971-a: 88].

But this debate was hampered by the rise in our ranks of a factional outbreak that sought the autonomy of the military wing and the supremacy of the latter on the collective political leadership. The personal ambitions of some of the military commanders (especially Douglas Bravo), fed by the left adventurist positions of some others who insisted on the viability of a military victory (Teodoro Petkoff, Freddy Muñoz), created a very complex situation in our Party, which took over two years for the final decision of the military withdrawal.

From left petty-bourgeois positions, typical of a radicalized intelligentsia, the opportunists of the time promoted in our ranks the cult of the Cuban guerrilla experience as an example to follow, but in the abstract, without taking into account the specific conditions prevailing in Venezuela, and more importantly, without organic connection with the wide sections of the people and especially the working class. It is symptomatic that simultaneously with militarist deviation, a process of almost complete abandonment of Party work in the labour front and contempt for the work of peasant organization in everything that did not have to do directly with military activity was also developed: "...the leadership of the Party was seized by a disdain for the trade union work and it came to the conclusion that, in practice, it was not worth to devote material nor human resources to the trade union organizations or, in general, to any non-armed mass oriented work In some years of the 60s the trade union leaders of the PCV were considered like pariah, unnecessary elements for the revolutionary victory that was expected to be obtained exclusvely by the armed struggle" [1971-a: 97-98]. Worst of military diversion was settled with the expulsion of Bravo and others, who then founded the party called Venezuelan Revolutionary Party (PRV), already disappeared. However, other elements in our ranks continued feeding leftist adventurism and attacking the unity of our organization. The extension of that state of affairs created the conditions, the "breeding ground" for the development of new factionalism that would emerge at the end of the decade.

The decision of military withdrawal was finally taken by the 8th Central Committee Plenum of Emergency in April 1967, which set the general guidelines of PCV on armed struggle, since then ratified again and again, incorporated since 1980 to the Party program and valid until today. We claim and honor the heroic sacrifice of the hundreds of activists who gave their lives in those years and the thousands more who suffered prison, torture and persecution, and recognize the legitimacy of the use of armed tactics by people when conditions demand it, but we will always endeavor to promote the development of our strategic objectives in the least traumatic way possible and winning the broadest popular support for that goal: "The PCV will devote its efforts so the anti-imperialist, anti-monopoy, anti-oligarchic, democratic and popular transformations, and the passage of Venezuela to socialism, take place with as few sacrifices as possible. Therefore we will be sustained by the workers' organization, adding all possible forces in order to express our people's will, making the enemy impotent and avoiding provocations, but we will not hesitate in using the highest forms of struggle in order to obtain the workers' and people's victory, to defend the social and political conquests if the dominant classes use fraud or counter-revolutionary and fascist violence in their selfish interests to distort the people's will" [1980-b: 74-75]. Throughout 1969, as the process of preparation and discussion of the 4th National Congress of the Party began, those who had more strongly encouraged opportunistic positions in the previouse years finally announced their break with the PCV. The "dissidents", rather than explain and defend their views in the different organs during the discussions that were beginning just launched a public campaign of attacks against the Party, against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, against Leninism [1970, 1976, 1979].

Several weeks before the celebration of the 4th National Congress in January 1971, Pompey Marquez, Petkoff, Eloy Torres and Alfredo Maneiro Muñoz, among others, had left our ranks and initiated the organization of a new party, MAS, which was initially presented as a defender of the genuine communist positions, and even claimed the name of "Venezuelan Communist Force." Due to the prestige that these leaders had reached, especially among our younger or less experienced members, the damage caused by this desertion was very large, particularly in the ranks of the Communist Youth of Venezuela (JCV), which were significantly decreased, and between intellectual and professional sectors [1971-b]. The 4th National Congress of the PCV and the Central Committee elected in that event, immediately sparked a counter-offensive that sought to expose the true character of the new organization, whose ideological vacillation, composition, structure and internal dynamics inexorably condemned it to drift and move further away from their intended left positions: "There is nothing new nor original in all formulations made [by the dissidents]. And all that discourse, that alleged "new way of being socialist" is nothing else but a smoke screen to hide what is actually a right-wing scattering. Their practice since 1970 shows that this is the path they have chosen. And that path only leads to a fatal precipice" [1976: 106]. The subsequent development of events has vindicated our Party: Throughout the years, the alleged "new Communists" first decried the "real socialism", almost immediately renounced Leninism (and the nickname "Communist Force"), then what they termed as "orthodox Marxism", later to all Marxism, and finally to any form of genuine socialism. Today, the old MAS is just a name, increasingly incongruous with their actual political practice that has even led them to an alliance with the fascist right-wing in their efforts to derail the process of national liberation in progress in our country since 1999.

During the rest of the 1970s and the first half of 1980s, our Party had to face several other outbreaks of opportunism, but none of them as serious and damaging as those already mentioned. Between 1971 and 1974, the remnants of factional groups that had lagged behind in our ranks, and other elements that were consistent with those in practice, encountered an internal environment of greater discipline, a stronger organic life and a Party frankly decided to amend and re-proletarianize, in compliance with the agreements of the 4th Congress: "...the latest crisis proves the need to proletarianize more and more our leadership, so it is indispensable to promote a higher number of wokers and peasants to the category of PCV leaders [...] as the best guarantee for this Party to keep vigilat in order to reject the ideological and organizational smuggling from those who, coming from other social classes, usually come to the leadership of the PCV not to help the working class, but to modify its course..." [1971-a: 100]. Under such difficult internal conditions that made it difficult to disrupt again the life of the organization, the stragglers went away individually or in small groups, with relatively minor consequences. Other smaller groups left our Party and Youth in the mid-1980s (just before and just after our 7th National Congress, 1985), with even less relevant consequences.

III The weakening and decline of PCV from 1988 to 1998 was mainly caused by external causes to our Party and our country. These were the years of the crisis and subsequent collapse of the socialist bloc in Central Europe and Eurasia, and particularly the Soviet Union, the main reference for our Party from the very moment of its foundation in 1931.

However, the PCV was active and hoisted the banner of Marxism-Leninism, even in the darkest moments of the crisis, when there was great pressure from national and international opportunist forces to transform our party into an "post-communist" organization similar to those which actually appeared in those years in other countries. Although shrinking and cornered, after our 9th National Congress in 1992 we launched, with great courage and conviction, the slogan "Socialism is still the hope of the people!", in a moment when global capitalism theoreticians celebrated the "end of history" and the alleged final victory of the exploitation system.

We managed to get our of that decline thanks to the bankruptcy of the two-party system and the neo-liberal economic model in our country. The development of national history had shown that after all our warnings against neo-liberalism and our strong opposition to the two-party system over four decades had been correct. The process of national liberation led by Hugo Chavez began in 1999, on par with the gradual recovery of our Party. But at that moment a new round of fighting against our left-wing and right-wing deviations, both inside and outside our ranks, began.

The PCV was, by order of our 10th National Conference in 1998, the first Party that officially endorsed the presidential candidacy of Chavez, and is now the only member of the original alliance (in which participated MAS and other former communist individuals and organizations splitted from our Party during the above mentioned episodes) that continues to support him. But this support has not been, nor it is, uncritical or mechanic: since the beginning of President Chávez's government, our Party has exposed, with care and warmth but firmly, political and ideological deviations of the President himself and those around him. Initially propeller of a generic and vague nationalism, the President has fluctuated over the years between the alleged "third way", a misunderstanding Bolivarianism, some elements of social Christianity, the leftist Social Democrats and several other varieties of reformism, until 2005 (and ever since then) when he coincided with our party in that socialism is the only way to the future of humanity. However, there are still conceptual and political confusions that hinder the effective progress in that way.

In this sense, the 14th National Congress of the PCV, in August 2011, confirmed the diagnosis already done by our Central Committee on several occasions, at least since 2007, about the nature and content of the process headed by President Chávez: "...among the personalities and government members who seem interested in advancing towards socialism there is a predominant and heterogenous mixture of idealist and petty bourgeois conceptions about the new society and the ways to advance towards its construction. As there is no scientific conception of socialism, consistent and firmly based on the principles of historical materialism, in the highest ranks of the political leadership, the process of changes has no clarity in the key definition in order to lever up its advance in the right direction" [2011]. In the same opportunity, our Party also identified the concrete historical cause of such deviations: "...on one hand, the social subject that has leaded the process until now corresponds to the middle sectors and the petty bourgeoisie, not the working class, who is the true social subject that is historically called to build socialism; on the other hand, the working class itself and the working people from town and country in general have not already reached in our country the necessary level of consciousness, organization, clarity of programme and mobilization that allows them to impose their class hegemony and modify the course of events in the right direction". [2011].

IV The friendly but firm ideological confrontation we have had over the years with President Chavez and his environment, reached a climax when in 2006-2007 the President, unilaterally and without consultation, gave all parties and organizations that supported him then the instructions to dissolve and join the new political organization he was building, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

This situation worsened some tensions that had been developing within our Party between a majority proposing to deepen and strengthen PCV's own and independent profile as a class organization who was an ally but was not submitted to the President, and a minority who had been showing deviations which were inappropriate in a proletarian party, both in the language and the ideas as in political practice and working methods. The Central Committee took the wise decision to convene a National Congress in extraordinary session, just five months after the conclusion of our previous Congress, so it was this high body of our organization who debated and decided the situation posed by the presidential order.

Our 13th National Congress (Extraordinary) was held between January and March 2007, a result of which we approved the Thesis on the Party of the Revolution, which accurately exposes the conception of the Party held byt the revolutionaries of the world: a Party with clearly defined class orientation, with the ideology and program of the working class, internationalist-minded, with a collective leadership and an inner life emanating from the principles of democratic centralism and absolute independence against the bourgeoisie and its instrument, the bourgeois state. [2007-a].

This definition of the revolutionary Party was and is incompatible with the proposals that had been made for the construction of the PSUV, which was foreshadowed from the beginning as a multi-class organization, with a strong influence of the petty bourgeoisie and state officials, and no defined ideological profile, so the vast majority of PCV rejected the instructions issued by President Chavez. The 13th Congress, consistently, also adopted the Political Resolution, which distinguished between the need to move, together with President Chavez and his new party and other forces, in building a broad front to develop the anti-imperialist struggle currently underway in our country, and the parallel need to strengthen and develop a strong and genuinely class Party as an instrument for the future task of socialist construction: "The widest unity of the political and social forces is need at a national, continental and world level in order to achieve victory in the anti-imperialist struggle. At the same time, the advance towards socialism demands the construction of a revolutionary party that gathers the cadres who express the most consistent positions of the classes and social layers which have been historically committed to revolution and socialism; a party that is built in the ideological, political and organizational vanguard, a party that organizationally, collectively and unitedly leads the creative effort of the masses in order to destroy the capitalist state and assume the tasks of the construction of the People's Power; a party that promotes values, principles and behaviours directed to overcome the bourgeois cultural hegemony still dominating. This political organization must express, in its theory and social practice, our people's historical and struggle traditions, which have a deep Bolivarian grass roots, and the Marxism-Leninism applied to the concrete conditions of our homeland" [2007-b: 98]. Thus, the outbreak of liquidationism was quickly and decisively defeated. However, just over a third of the members of our Central Committee, as well as important but isolated groups of regional leaders, local and grassroots activists in Caracas and several other regions of the country, disobeyed the decisions of the 13th Congress and "migrated" to the new president's party.

In some cases this "migration" was the result of disloya pressure exerted from the government against communist militants who were state employees and who were virtually forced to give up our ranks or their jobs. In other cases, young or uinexperienced militants gave up, confused by the undisputed leadership of the President and the affection that his figure awakens in our party and in broad sectors of the Venezuelan people. In others, it was the result of personal ambitions of command and leadership that were not welcome in our organization and sought other spaces for their realization, and finally, in some key cases, it was result of the right-wing opportunist temptations born from the closeness that had been rowing between the positions of certain leaders of our Party and the petty-bourgeois sectors that dominate the process of change currently underway in Venezuela.

In the latter sense, it is very significant that, several years before the mentioned episode, some of our leaders had been adopting in their analysis and speeches certain categories and formulas alien to Marxism-Leninism and very characteristic of the confusing amalgam of ideas from the petty-bourgeois sectors in government. Notable examples of this include the use misleading and unscientific category of "empire" in place of "imperialism", which mystifies the nature of the highest stage of capitalism and hinders its proper understanding and analysis, the adoption of the phrases "Fourth Republic" and "Fifth Republic" to refer to the governments before and after 1999, ignoring the fact that the class essence (bourgeois) of the Venezuelan state apparatus has not been altered, and therefore from the standpoint of historical materialism there has been continuity in substance, or the overly optimistic use of the term "revolution" and "revolutionary government" to refer to the process of change led by President Chavez, whose genuinely revolutionary character is still under observation. We must admit self-critically that traces of this style of language and analysis even managed to leak some of the documents that we adopted at our 12th National Congress of 2006, which reveals the depth and seriousness that this deviation had reached.

Just six months after the completion of the 13th Congress (Extraordinary), we conducted our 11th National Conference, in order to complete the restoration of our leading bodies and definitely overcome the aftermath of the crisis that began the previous year. This Conference established the principles that would govern (and continue to govern) relations between our Party and the PSUV as allies in building broad anti-imperialist front, in a framework of mutual respect and non-interference in the internal life of each organization also established some guidelines for the PCV relations with our former militants who had "migrated" (this was the term used then) to the ally Party: "Despite the fact that their behaviour was distant from the internal rules of PCV, [the "migrated"] should not be considered as defectors or traitors, for they have decided to join an organization that is not counter-revolutionary; on the contrary [...] this new Party is objectivelly our ally in the tasks towards the national liberatory revolution" [2007-c: 125]. Although somewhat numerically weakened by such "migrations" our Party emerged from this episode refined and reinvigorated on the ideological level. Since then we have tried to exercise greater care in the scientific rigor of our analysis and in the correct and precise use of Marxism-Leninism categories.

At the same time, we have seen how former communists who began their ideological degeneration in the years 2005-2007, have continued outside our Party slipping on the path of opportunism towards increasingly distant positions from revolutionary science, reaching in recent times to distort fundamental postulates of Marxist political economy or challenge the character of the working class as a key driver of the future socialist revolution. Following that way, we repeat it now as we said in the 70s about who founded MAS, you can only get to "a fatal precipice". V The case of parties and organizations who, although objectively currently collaborating with national and transnational right-wing in their efforts to restore the status quo before 1999, insist to call themselves "progressive" or "left", deserves special attention. We refer in particular to the degenerate remnants of old organizations that achieved their peak in previous decades with a progressive and even revolutionary speech and style, but have been unmasked by history as the product of opportunistic outbreaks without real revolutionary substance.

The most tragic of them, but probably not the most important by their numbers or influence, is called Bandera Roja (BR). This is a group with roots in the movements that persisted in the tactics of armed struggle after the military withdrawal of PCV in 1967, and is the result of successive splits and recombinations of the defunct Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR, result in turn of a division of Social-Democrat AD), plus various adventurous groups of heterogeneous origin who were adding to it over the years. In its ideological composition we could identify elements of Maoism and Guevarism (doctrine called "focalism").

Since the mid 1970s, isolated from the working-class background and virtually unconnected to any important mass movement, the main arena of political action BR was the student movement, where it had a certain influence and where it recruited most of its cadres. Our Party and our youth repeatedly censored opportunism and adventurism of the actions of BR, and sought wherever possible to engage in political debate with their leaders.

During the 1980s, increasingly isolated, cornered and infiltrated by state security forces, BR and its surrounding suffered severe blows at the hands of the police and military repression that caused them heavy casualties, particularly in the so-called "massacres of Cantaura and Yumare", denounced at the time by our Party as State crimes against humanity. Since then, dismantled its military wing, BR retreated to exclusively student university scenarios, were it starred in provocative actions of great courage but without constructive political content, which were almost unanimously rejected by the population.

From far-left opportunism, BR went to far-right in the late 90s, on the imminence of the election victory of President Chavez. Some of its cadres then broke with the organization and joined the political project of the President (and now occupy important positions in the PSUV and the government), while others were declared in opposition to the new government and became, in the practice, the shock troops at the service of those who had persecuted and killed them in previous decades.

We must also consider the case of an organization called the Radical Cause (La Causa-R or LCR). Founded around 1972 as a result of disagreements and conflicts between the renegade leadership expelled from our ranks in 1971 (especially Maneiro on the one hand, and Petkoff, Marquez and Munoz on the other), LCR was during his early years an organization in the shadow of the MAS, which was much bigger.

Taking advantage of the void left by the Communists in the labour movement during the armed struggle (error from which we have not managed to completely recover), LCR grew rapidly in the trade unions during the 1970s and 1980s, and managed to achieve important influence especially among the workers of large metallurgical industries in the Guayana region. There the opportunistic nature of LCR showed up again and was then in evidence which was to be their political fate: their particular practice at the forefront of the union movement was increasingly workerist and demanding and increasingly remote from the genuine class unionism.

The degeneration of the LCR-controlled unions led them even to openly corrupt practices and the progressive deterioration of their influence. In the early 90's, LCR had a brief heyday as a national political party, in their own or supporting individual right-wing figures, but their lack of ideological and political coherence prevented them from further growth and led to their decline almost immediately. They were part of the alliance that supported the presidential candidacy of Hugo Chávez in 1998, but in the early years of the new government they broke with the President and joined the opposition, where it remains today.

An important group of their leaders chose to stay with President Chavez and formed a new organization, the party Patria Para Todos (PPT), which after at least two splits, has finally joined LCR in the ranks of the opposition. Some of those who were part of the PPT decided in 2007 to join the PSUV and today remain beside the President.

MAS and its derivatives, with BR and LCR and their descendants, now claim to use their remote left-wing past to hoist allegedly "progresive" flags and pose as the "left wing" of the opposition to President Chávez. This maneuver, another demonstration of the opportunistic nature and classless nature of such elements, tries to confuse some sectors of the working class and the wide people, and therefore should be denounced and unmasked. VI Time to close with some conclusions and lessons to be learned from our history of struggle against opportunism. The first and foremost is the confirmation on our own experience of Lenin's assertion as to the origin and nature of opportunism as an expression of the inescapable presence in the ranks of the revolutionary parties of petty bourgeois layers, with their own conceptions and trends: "...in every capitalist country there are always wide layers of petty bourgeoisie, of small owners, side by side with the proletariat [...] So it is very natural that the petty bourgeois conceptions of the world burst once and agains in the ranks of the big workers' parties" [1908: 26-27]. Each petty bourgeois layer present in our Party with enough force automatically tends, unless it is stopped in time, to develop their own variety of opportunism, in accordance with their characteristics, interests and profiles. Radicalized university intellectuals tend to left opportunism, as officials, professionals and other relatively established and prosperous sectors, tend to the right-wing variety.

From this diagnosis the prophylaxis and medicine for the disease is clear without too much effort: comprehensive proletarianization of our Party. We do not refer only to the deep assimilation of the views and proletarian ideology of Party members not originally coming from the working class, but especially to the effective and dominant presence of worker cadres in the Party leadership bodies in such high proportion as circumstances permit. The latter is what Comrade Alvaro Cunhal called the "golden rule": "An important guarantee for the class policy of the Party is the determinant participation of working class militantes in the leadership, i.e., a party leadership with a working class majority. [...] The most frequent (and the general rule) is that bourgeois ideology has more influence in the intellectuals than in the workers and therefore the determinant participation of workers in the leadership guarantees more solidness in the principles than the determinant participation of comrades from a different social origin" [1985: 62]. And such a rule, as we have seen, was precisely the medicine that PCV prescribed to himself in the 4th National Congress of 1971. In this sense, our 13th and 14th Congresses, and our 11th Conference, have insisted in recent years on the need to increase the proletarian presence in the ranks of our Party, and have prioritized and worked among the working class as first task of the PCV. But we must recognize that, although we have recently had some major successes in this regard, our Party today is still not able to fully comply with that golden principle.

The second major lesson from our experience is that implacable dialectic of history, sooner or later, is imposed on all opportunists, even against their will, and eventually pushes them to the camp of the bourgeoisie; ie, all opportunism always ends up being right-wing, regardless of the forms and slogans initially adopted. And this is because they all have in common a central element: their rejection or ignorance of the point of view of the proletariat, leaving them unable to appreciate the historical perspective of the overall development of societies [1924].

Indeed, as Lenin himself says, all opportunism, one way or another, with varying theorizing emphasis, with varying degrees of subtlety, always "falsifies Marxism amputating everything that the bourgeoisie can not accept" [1918: 490]. And of course, the first thing to be maimed in our doctrine to win acceptance of the bourgeoisie, is precisely the class analysis, center and cornerstone of all Marxism.

It is therefore imperative to exercise the utmost vigilance in terms of theoretical and conceptual rigor in our analysis, and the use of accurate scientific categories of Marxism-Leninism. Experience shows that outbreaks are usually announced with opportunistic deviations or "innovations" in the level of discourse and analysis, even before they become visible in the field of practical action.

This does not mean in any way that we dogmatically resist the legitimate and necessary development of revolutionary science, or that we should close ourselves to the natural healthy debate and exchange of ideas both inside and outside our ranks.O n the contrary, it means that we address all debate and all potential doctrinal development with the utmost seriousness and rigor. Science can and must grow and develop, but it is our obligation to exercise critical vigilance so, among the legitimate innovations there is no infiltration of ideological smuggling that denatures the tested foundings of Marxism-Leninism, especially in what has to do with class analysis.

Finally, we note that our battles against liquidationism have reaffirmed us in the importance of maintaining the independence and the organizational and programmatic autonomy of the political party of the working class. As demonstrated by the subsequent development of events, giving in to liquidationist pressure, however powerful and seductive it was at the time, would have been a catastrophic failure, which would have left the working class politically disarmed, and in an even higher level of distress and disruption in face of the petty bourgeois and bourgeois forces and positions.

We make our own, in this sense, the words of Comrade José Carlos Mariátegui: "...the vanguard of proletariat and the conscious workers, faithful to the action in the field of the class struggle, reject all tendency meaning the merger with the political forces or organisms from other classes. We condemn as opportunistic all policy that promotes the temporary renounce of proletariat to its programme and activity independence, which must be integrally safeguarded at all times" [1930: 201]. Today, once the positions that wanted to liquidate our Party have been defeated and the influences that aspired to dilute or distort our class profile and get us away from the Marxist-Leninits ideology have been submitted, the PCV grows stronger with new energy, and the compass pointing firmly into the perspective of socialist revolution and communist future. References